Young people like to move, they cannot sit still; they embody the idea of life as movement. Youth is the stage of becoming aware that life involves constant emergence into something new and is especially novel because it involves multi-dimensional emergence. Today�s teens provide a mirror of who we are because they are coming to where we have led them, or misled them. Youth reflect what they see around them.
In carving personal and social identities, principles and autonomy, youth must quickly grasp relationships, developmental stages, as well as sex, drugs and occupation. Being a teen can last for more than a decade due to unclear definitions of the beginning, middle and end. The most arduous of developmental tasks is balancing all of them to minimize conflict and realize measurable strengths. Choices may conflict with ideals of peers, parents and society and in complex, rapidly changing societies, the formation of a stable adult identity can be slow and difficult.
With the development of a social identity, choosing the kinds of people to befriend and the kind of relationships to pursue, anxiety increases with the fear of rejection. The central task of the teen is to establish an integrated identity of autonomy, occupational goals, and coming to terms with physical maturity and adult sexuality. Besides redefining social roles, the hallmark of the formation of adolescent identities, is the appraisal of ones abilities and interests; an awareness of realistic alternatives; the ability to make and follow through on a choice. Refining social skills by trying out different social roles and behaviour is often coupled with more time spent away from home, digitally or physically, and family ties are stretched. A vicious cycle arises out of the disconnection between youth, family and community.
Issues directly associated with these pressures and changes in the lives of youth are eating disorders, AIDS, young mothers and drugs. With a heightened emphasis on peer acceptance, individuals tend to become increasingly self-focussed on appearance. Along with dramatic physical changes, a new awareness of sexual feelings and impulses contributes to a growing trend in young people having sex though they lack adequate knowledge or have misconceptions about it. Also, coming to terms with drugs has emerged as a new task in the (not-so-)normal process of growing up in contemporary society. Very dangerous drugs are highly accessible and abuse is a problem. Unfortunately, when learn of these issues through mass media, the image is sensationalised and solutions are not within reach.
The great majority of youth though are quiet, conservative and more inclined to conform than rebel. Most youth prefer the comfort of passivity and apathy to radical action. Few cause society much trouble. Adolescence and early adulthood is when thinking becomes abstract. Logical reasoning means that teens can now see how their particular reality is only one of several imaginable realities. Deep questions of truth, justice, and existence begin to be pondered. However, anything that isolates youth from social support - a reliable network of family and friends - puts them at risk of a host of physical and mental problems like social pathologies. We must actively diffuse or reduce the pressures and increase support to see that youth meet their potential and the challenge of transition into adulthood without fear and isolation.
It is the belief of the author that school is integral to achieving measurable social change. No developmental asset should be excluded from the school setting, and yet it seems their role is more in isolation than support. Looking critically at today�s educational institutions, we find it rooted in competition, relying on rote memorization (mechanical repetition), the suppression of curiosity, separation of gender, as well as overall emphasis on submission to authority. The history of our curriculum-based, authoritative learning facilities goes back to military aristocracies deciding that they needed to reform education so that new centralized schools could produce obedient soldiers and workers. The general goal was uniformity in thought, word and deed; citizens who thought alike on most issues.
A hidden curriculum is penetrating youth from inside schools. Students are conditioned to be dependant on more treatment, and it renders them incapable of organizing their own lives around their own experiences and resources within their own communities. There is a myth in the hidden curriculum that bureaucracies are efficient and benevolent. The system fosters self-defeating consumption, alienating production, tolerance for institutional dependance, and recognition of institutional rankings. By insisting on certification of teachers, skills are scarce, and all educational programs are filtered through them. Imaginations are schooled to accept service in place of value (quantity over quality). We are schooled to confuse grade advancement with education, and teachers with learning.
In order to learn, one might ask oneself, what things and people might learners want? If we think idealistically for a moment, the vision of a real education is not hard to see: provide access to all who want to learn, and empower those who want to share knowledge. School should bring together those who have a skill and want to share, with those who want to learn it. There are plentiful resources which are not because conceived as conventional.
Peers are invaluable because they often share the same interests, and the opportunity for companionship and asking questions will arise. Elders can share their superior experience and offer advice. Sometimes no further human assistance is necessary than a demonstration on how to do what the learner wants to do. Skill models are a necessary resource in education, can help diagnose learning difficulties in learning and can motivate to learn by preparing youth for a lifelong interest in seeking new partners for endeavours. This takes into question the fundamentally hierarchal, authoritative structure of today�s classrooms.
The teacher�s role should be to facilitate healthier, smarter, more autonomous learning by building coherence and co-operation through undermining differences. If nothing else, facilitators need to acknowledge that each stage of growth and development is a movement toward becoming more mature and complete. There must be no ulterior purpose: for the teacher and student the experience must be meaningful. In claiming principles of liberation, autonomy, non-coercion, the power of working with others, it must be easy for youth to pursue goals which might contradict the ideals of the facilitators. Teachers must recognize their place while transparent, self-critical, and taking active responsibility for actions, choices and policies. Learning must be student centred, teacher guided and interdisciplinary. By providing access to resources and helping to find the quickest path to reach goals, developmental assets can find their appropriate roles in the classroom and community.
With such a community education infrastructure in tact, the vision of permanent, long-term, and measurable social change comes into focus. Turning ideals into action, though, is the largest and final step in realizing the vision. Having already gone over where school came from, what it is today, what youth need and what school should be, where do we go from here? First, we can talk about how already existing social infrastructures can work to change themselves through consciousness and leadership in schools. Following this: a very brief summary of such community based free-schooling around the world. Then, with our ideals on education we can construct learning-opportunity webs and reconstruct relational structures.
In our own backyards, change with happen with the construction of communities of resistance in schools. For teachers who are working within the system now there is much to do besides perennial pleas for smaller class sizes and better administrative support. Transcending teacher domination in the classroom is actual dialogue, which should be a persistent top priority. The ultimate obstacle to dynamic education remains the television which erodes creativity, cultivates passivity and feeds obesity. For this reason, teachers should read aloud one provocative news article, brief essay, short story or poem because this might even be the only force encouraging the liberty of reading, unlike the mandatory texts. By befriending coworkers with similar alternative interests, possibilities arise of cooperative teaching by sharing resources, discussions and presentations. Promote community involvement, like through guests whose ideas might otherwise be rejected by students or reprimanded by administrators. Also, research should involve making critical connections so what would work is neighbourhood street fairs, local concerts, art exhibitions and sports tournaments. Field trips to other schools promote crossing class, status and race boundaries. Demonstrations of how to protest teach youth that there are many forms of protesting legally. To minimize the competitive reality of schools today, try student centred evaluations like cooperative exams and efforts to avoid mandatory testing. Student centred, teacher guided, and self motivated instead of teacher compelled education is the learning revolution.
In varying degrees, such examples teaching are happening around the world. Countries with free schooling communities include USA, Ecuador, Scotland, Brazil, India and Japan. A great example of historical free schools is the Modern School established by Fransisco Ferrer who also sparked the free education movement based on egalitarianism. The Modern School recognized that all people deserve education and nurtured the talents of all students without the use of authority. Skills were developed in ways stimulating to the students through direct, multiple-experience with the world around them. Open discussions and investigations replaced isolated study and exams, turning classrooms into cooperative communities rather than competitive academics. There are many more examples around the world worth looking what has already been achieved elsewhere.
The invert of school is possible through learning webs and new relational structures. An opportunity web must be built: ensure everyone�s ample access to things, models, peers and elders. New, readily available networks designed to spread equal opportunity for teaching and learning. To facilitate access to real education, such weblike relational structures require technical and legal administrative support. Next, I will outline the steps necessary to make education the liberation of fundamental aspects to learning: access to things, sharing of skills, as well as the critical and creative resources of people.
Here are approaches to enable access to any educational resource and help in defining and achieving independently professed goals. Each contains its own value in highlighting points already made regarding teaching and learning webs.
Facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Bring community libraries, museums, theatres, farms, businesses and parks into the forefront of learning for everyone. Also, games are a special form of liberating education. Games can teach that conceptual operations have a game like nature and formal systems are built on changeable axioms. Formal learning institutions as well as games are learning opportunities worth offering more access to.
Very effective in nourishing the learning needs of communities are skill exchanges in the form of skill models, skill centres, and skill banks. Have a list of people�s contact information, skills and conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for others who want to learn their skills. With this database, at least three approaches could be utilized. A skill model possesses a skill and is willing to demonstrate its practice. By insisting on certification of teachers, skills are kept scarce. By removing barriers to teaching, restrictions to learning will also be removed. Free skill centres can provide opportunities to learn the fundamental prerequisites for entering certain apprenticeships. Volunteers can provide assistance in reading, writing, arithmetic, typing, languages and other things related to specific fields of work and study. A skill bank needs currency or credits with tangible incentive and promotes earning an education by sharing it. Each citizen could be given basic credits with which to acquire fundamental skills. Beyond the minimum basic credit, further credits come from teaching for the equivalent of time. Bringing people together who have a mutual interest in teaching and learning is a very powerful tool in education.
Peer matching means letting each person specify an activity for which a peer is sought, in hope finding partners for the inquiry. Such a communications network does not need the tangible incentives of skill banks, but students could get vouchers entitling them to a specific number of classes at the skill bank and depend otherwise on peers and teaching to acquire more vouchers. Peer matching provides young people with invitations to meet and seek out others, preparing them for a lifelong interest in seeking new partners for endeavours. People will go to great lengths to find peers, finding them is the reward and examples of this include book clubs, chess clubs, not profit advocacy groups, musicians, and athletes. A peer matching network�s mandate must be to increase chances that persons sharing similar interests could meet. Users identify their contact information and activities for which a partner is sought. Facilities should be available for individuals who want to bring people together by recognizing the right of a person of any age, class, race or gender to call a meeting. School space should be available to groups in the neighbourhood. This process could help significantly help in making explicit the many communities of the city both ethnic and political.
At the bottom of all of this, not the top, is the administration and designers. Encounters between students, models, leaders and educational objects could be overlooked to judge proficiency. Critical response to both teachers and learners is necessary. Helping select books and methods suitable to talents and character, are tasks of educators at large.